Scariest so far

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Did I sound smug in my last entry, at the bottom of the world´s most dangerous road, following my successful cycle ride? Well, I shouldn´t have. The journey back up!!

It´s far more scary being in the back of a jeep jumping around all over the place just centimetres from the edge, and it takes longer than going down. You also notice the smashed up vehicles at the bottom when you look out of the window.

We´d been going up for a few hours when we got stuck in a traffic jam and the van in front of us fell half down a ditch on the cliff side. It was dark and there were lorries, cars and vans trying to go in both directions, but everything came to a standstill, with the typical sheer drop to one side. Our guide and driver got out of the jeep to go and help with the recovery effort on the van. There was an enormous lorry carrying rock of some sort facing the other way from us, and overlapping with us, also stuck in the traffic. All of a sudden, he decided to reverse, and the back of his lorry started to plough into the bonnet of our jeep, making us rock around like crazy. He didn´t seem to feel there was anything there. Our driver wasn´t in the jeep to beep the horn, so we were just shouting and banging on the windows to no avail. Fortunately, someone outside noticed and made him stop, and we promptly got out of the jeep and huddled against the cliff face where we talked about how if anything else started to drive into us, we had nowhere to run.

It was all OK in the end of course, and it´s all helping to rid me of my fear of flying, that´s for sure.

The guide put all kinds of good, non-Andean-pipe music on in the jeep on the way there and back. I´m fed up with having not music. It´s 13 hours on the bus tmorrow to Uyuni to begin a four day tour of the south of the country: salts plains, etc. I think I might by an CD player and some pirated CDs...

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